Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia
RFC 821 - 2. THE SMTP MODEL

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### 2. THE SMTP MODEL

The SMTP design is based on the following model of communication: as the result of a user mail request, the sender-SMTP establishes a two-way transmission channel to a receiver-SMTP. The receiver-SMTP may be either the ultimate destination or an intermediate. SMTP commands are generated by the sender-SMTP and sent to the receiver-SMTP. SMTP replies are sent from the receiver-SMTP to the sender-SMTP in response to the commands.

Once the transmission channel is established, the SMTP-sender sends a MAIL command indicating the sender of the mail. If the SMTP-receiver can accept mail it responds with an OK reply. The SMTP-sender then sends a RCPT command identifying a recipient of the mail. If the SMTP-receiver can accept mail for that recipient it responds with an OK reply; if not, it responds with a reply rejecting that recipient (but not the whole mail transaction). The SMTP-sender and SMTP-receiver may negotiate several recipients. When the recipients have been negotiated the SMTP-sender sends the mail data, terminating with a special sequence. If the SMTP-receiver successfully processes the mail data it responds with an OK reply. The dialog is purposely lock-step, one-at-a-time.

                   +----------+                +----------+
       +------+    |          |                |          |
       | User |<-->|          |      SMTP      |          |
       +------+    |  Sender- |Commands/Replies| Receiver-|
       +------+    |   SMTP   |<-------------->|    SMTP  |    +------+
       | File |<-->|          |    and Mail    |          |<-->| File |
       |System|    |          |                |          |    |System|
       +------+    +----------+                +----------+    +------+

                    Sender-SMTP                Receiver-SMTP

                               Model for SMTP Use

                                    Figure 1

The SMTP provides mechanisms for the transmission of mail; directly from the sending user's host to the receiving user's host when the two host are connected to the same transport service, or via one or more relay SMTP-servers when the source and destination hosts are not connected to the same transport service.

To be able to provide the relay capability the SMTP-server must be supplied with the name of the ultimate destination host as well as the destination mailbox name.

The argument to the MAIL command is a reverse-path, which specifies who the mail is from. The argument to the RCPT command is a forward-path, which specifies who the mail is to. The forward-path is a source route, while the reverse-path is a return route (which may be used to return a message to the sender when an error occurs with a relayed message).

When the same message is sent to multiple recipients the SMTP encourages the transmission of only one copy of the data for all the recipients at the same destination host.

The mail commands and replies have a rigid syntax. Replies also have a numeric code. In the following, examples appear which use actual commands and replies. The complete lists of commands and replies appears in Section 4 on specifications.

Commands and replies are not case sensitive. That is, a command or reply word may be upper case, lower case, or any mixture of upper and lower case. Note that this is not true of mailbox user names. For some hosts the user name is case sensitive, and SMTP implementations must take case to preserve the case of user names as they appear in mailbox arguments. Host names are not case sensitive.

Commands and replies are composed of characters from the ASCII character set [1]. When the transport service provides an 8-bit byte (octet) transmission channel, each 7-bit character is transmitted right justified in an octet with the high order bit cleared to zero.

When specifying the general form of a command or reply, an argument (or special symbol) will be denoted by a meta-linguistic variable (or constant), for example, "<string>" or "<reverse-path>". Here the angle brackets indicate these are meta-linguistic variables. However, some arguments use the angle brackets literally. For example, an actual reverse-path is enclosed in angle brackets, i.e., "<John.Smith@USC-ISI.ARPA>" is an instance of <reverse-path> (the angle brackets are actually transmitted in the command or reply).

Next: 3. THE SMTP PROCEDURES

Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia
RFC 821 - 2. THE SMTP MODEL